Fake American accents

[mmcirvin]

There's lots of discussion of US/UK dialect fakery about the world of blogs lately. I just noticed a slightly older post in which Signifying Nothing says my positive impression of modern British actors' fake American accents is too rosy:

More recently, the less said about the accents of any of the actors in Dalek during the first season of the Doctor Who revival, or the president they killed off last year, the better.

Dalek was set in Utah in the very near future. There was some discussion of accents when the episode first aired, and if I recall correctly, almost all of those actors were American. One who wasn't was Anna-Louise Plowman, who played a character named Diana Goddard. Granted, I do remember her accent wobbling a little, though I didn't think it was all that bad.

I don't remember the dialogue in enough detail to know this, but it's possible that they sounded faker than they were because of idiomatic trouble in the script or because of weird direction. I do recall that everyone seemed to have been instructed to pronounce "Goddard" with nearly equal stress on the two syllables, "God-Ard", and without turning the last vowel into a schwa. That sounded like a nonstandard pronunciation for US English.

Comments

[thesaucernews.livejournal.com]

Anthony LaPaglia and Maryanne Jean-Baptiste, respectively, are Australian and English, portraying New Yorkers on Without a Trace. Until I was made aware of this, I hadn't been able to detect anything in their accents... but afterwards I could hear a vowel wibble every now and then.

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

Makes me think of Kodos as Clin-Ton.

[aderack.livejournal.com]

There are a ton of invisibly British actors on American shows these days. The fellow who plays Michael Cutter on Law & Order; Lee Adama on Battlestar Galactica (curiously enough, as the show already has a mix of accents).

That is something curious I notice, though -- whenever there's an American accent on Doctor Who, however reasonable, all the British people seem to explode about how fake it sounds... and about half the time it's the actor's natural accent. "Dalek" is the most hilarious example of that, of course.

I don't know if "Daleks in Manhattan" counts in this discussion, as those accents would be put on in exactly the same way by American actors.

[aderack.livejournal.com]

The scripts definitely aren't written to an American ear or vocabulary, however.

"My biscuit tin is filled with EAST-rogen..."

The best so far has been Steven Moffat, in The Empty Child. He used the term "cell phone"!

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

I think that's a large part of the problem. British actors can actually be much more seamlessly American in a show written and directed by Americans for American audiences. To some extent, the dialect oddities in the Doctor Who scripts are probably even intentional, to make the episodes more comprehensible to British viewers.

The Christopher Nolan Batman movies are now famous for being full of non-American actors doing more or less flawless American accents.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

...Hmm, Christopher Nolan is himself a US/UK dual citizen.

[anton-p-nym.livejournal.com]

Jaime Bamber (Apollo) probably would've been able to use his native accent in Galactica except that he was cast as the son of Edward James Olmos's character (Adama) and the contrast would've been jarring.

-- Steve can think of another British actor broadly praised for his American accent, and a good thing too... who'd want to have their illness diagnosed by Bertie Wooster?

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Hugh Laurie's is indeed well-done. Amusingly, Stephen Fry can't fake an American accent to save his life--he tries it a lot on QI and it's painful.

[anton-p-nym.livejournal.com]

It occurs to me to wonder at what "Eddie" Olmos's faux-English accent might be like. *shudder*

-- Steve won't hold Fry's irrevokable Britishness against him; some voices deserve to be distinctive.

[smashingstars.livejournal.com]

Steve Coogan ("Alan Partridge") seems to have a decent American accent, as does Helena Bonham-Carter. However, I recall American accents on "Inspector Morse", "Black Adder" and "Jeeves & Wooster" that were so terrible that I didn't even know what accent they were supposed to have.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

I still think there's been a definite improving trend. However, part of it probably is that the stuff made for domestic British consumption doesn't have the really good American accents in it, because there's no need and because the writing isn't properly idiomatic.

[chicken-cem.livejournal.com]

Another part of the problem is that there are so many kinds of American accents. Holding people to an invisible, multi-faceted standard makes no sense. It isn't as if there's really a solid American equivalent to RP. My mother always tried to claim there was some nebulous "Midwest" accent that is the standard and that was selected during WWII as a standard for announcements on navy ships, that sort of Dave Letterman accent, but I dunno.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Something close to a Nebraskan accent--think Johnny Carson--seems to have been the standard for American network TV announcers and news anchors for some time. (Carson always reminded me of my dad; his accent is exactly the same, though my speech takes more after my Iowan mother.)

But big-network broadcast TV is dying and the market's fragmenting, and the Internet makes it easier to expose oneself to TV from other countries; it's interesting to speculate whether that will have an effect on what people expect from TV announcer dialects. Certainly Peter Jennings' Canadian-derived dialect was already somewhat different from the supposed standard.

I've always been fascinated by that accent used by old American newsreel and radio announcers in the 1930s and 1940s, which sounds to me sort of like a rapid version of the old upper-class New England accent. I think it was an old professional standard related to the "fancy" accent affected by Americans in very old movies (sometimes called "Mid-Atlantic", meaning not Mid-Atlantic States but halfway between the US and England). Nobody uses it any more, though something a little like the newsreel accent survived for a time as a bad fake American accent used by British actors.

[chicken-cem.livejournal.com]

I also love that newsreel accent. In "League of Their Own" they did a creditable job of recreating it.

[smashingstars.livejournal.com]

The newsreel voiceovers often used what I think of as the FDR accent, which is similar to Katherine Hepburn's so-called "Mid-Atlantic" accent but without the refinement. Maurice LaMarche is pretty good at the accent -- he seems to try for an Ed Herlihy voice -- but even he can't completely match it. Same with the actor who voices the newsreel in "Citizen Kane". That said, I've heard Herlihy in more modern films and he doesn't sound quite the same, either, so I think the sound systems may have something to do with it. Or age.

I've read a lot of film books that say that early 1930s American stars affected British accents, but I don't see it myself. British characters and actors in the 1930s were made fun of, they weren't necessarily seen as refined. Actors affected an upper-class East Coast accent, broadly for comedy and more subdued for actual drama.

Aaaaaaaaand I'll hush up now.

[aderack.livejournal.com]

Thing about that "mid-Atlantic" accent is that it wasn't always an affectation; people actually spoke that way. My maternal grandfather, for instance. He was brought up in a fabulously rich household, before his father ran off somewhere and left his family with his debts, and he carried that accent for the rest of his life.

It is interesting how that seems to have gone away with hats, though.

[urbeatle.livejournal.com]

I'd have to agree that a lot of the criticism of American accents on British TV probably does boil down to idioms rather than accents. I somehow auto-translated idiomatic expressions in "Dalek" and the two-parter in Depression-era Manhattan and didn't find anything wrong with the accents, but some friends complained about the "bad American accents" in those episodes, despite the heavily-American cast in "Dalek". They were also turned off by the showgirl's accent in "Daleks in Manhattan", but I've seen lots of Depression-era films with showgirl characters who talked pretty much like that, so she seemed fine to me, although she'd probably get some doubletakes if she tried to pass that off on the streets of modern New York as an American accent.

The fun thing about "Dalek", for me, was that usually when Brits refer to America, they only talk about the biggest American cities, usually just New York, DC, and Los Angeles, occasionally San Francisco, Chicago, or New Orleans. But in "Dalek", they had that gag of naming off a bunch of cities beginning with the same letter, and they named cities that would be well-known to most Americans, but you otherwise don't hear in non-American media. Including Sacramento. Yeah, petty, but it did give more of a feel that the characters may actually be familiar with the country they're supposed to be living in.

Dr Who's Assistant by Geraldine Quinn

[timchuma.livejournal.com]

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